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This thesis examines the American novelist Norman Mailer’s relationship to the 20th century avant-garde. Mailer is often remembered as a pioneer in the new documentary modes of subjective non-fiction of the sixties. Looking beyond the decade’s themes of fact and fiction, this thesis opens up Mailer’s aesthetics in general to other areas of historical and theoretical enquiry, primarily art history and psychoanalysis. In doing so, it argues that Mailer’s work represents a thoroughgoing aesthetic and political response to modernism in the arts, a response that in turn fuels a critical opposition to postmodern aesthetics. Two key ideas are explored here. The first is narcissism. In the sixties, Mailer was an avatar of what Christopher Lasch called the “culture of narcissism”. The self-advertising non-fiction was related to an emerging postmodern self-consciousness in the novel. Yet the myth of Narcissus has a longer history in the story of modernist aesthetics. Starting with the concept’s early articulation by Freudian psychoanalysis, this thesis argues that narcissism was for Mailer central to human subjectivity in the 20th century. It was also a defining trait of technological modernity in the wake of the atom bomb and the Holocaust. Mailer, then, wasn’t just concerned with the aesthetics of narcissism: he was also deeply concerned with its ethics. Its logic is key to almost every major theme of his work: technology, war, fascist charisma, sexuality, masculinity, criminality, politics, art, media and fame. This thesis will also examine how narcissism was related for Mailer to themes of trauma, violence, facing and recognition. The second idea that informs this thesis is the theoretical question of “the real”. A later generation of postmodernists thought that Mailer’s initially radical work was excessively grounded in documentary and traditional literary realism. Yet while the question of realism was central for Mailer, he approached this question from a modernist standpoint. He identified with the modernist perspectivism of Picasso and his eclectic “attacks on reality”, and brought this modernist humanism to a critical analysis of postmodernism. The postwar (and ongoing) debates about postmodern and realism in the novel connect in Mailer, I argue, to what Hal Foster calls the “return of the real” in the 20th century avant-garde. This thesis also links Mailer to psychoanalytical views on trauma and violence; anti-idealist philosophy in Bataille and Adorno; and later postmodern art historical engagements with realism and simulation. Mailer’s view was that a hunger for the real was an effect of a desensitising (post)modernity. While the key decade is the sixties, the study begins in 1948 with Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead, and ends at the height of the postmodern eighties. Drawing on a range of postmodern theory, this thesis argues that Mailer’s fiction sought to confront postmodern reality without ceding to the absurdity of the postmodern novel. The thesis also traces Mailer’s relationship to a range of contemporary art and visual culture, including Pop Art (and Warhol in particular), and avant-garde and postmodern cinema. This study also draws on a broad range of psychoanalytical, feminist and cultural theory to explore Mailer’s often troubled relationship to narcissism, masculinity and sexuality. The thesis engages a complex history of feminist perspectives on Mailer, and argues that while feminist critique remains necessary for a reading of his work, it is not sufficient to account for his restless exploration of masculinity as a subject. In chapter 7, the thesis also discusses Mailer’s much-criticised romantic fascination with black culture in the context of postcolonial politics.

This study is about British postwar fiction and its canonical reception according to a special categorisation of the novelists who were publishing in Britain during the two decades after the end of the Second World War. The study emphasises that mainstream literary criticism of 1950s and &rsquo / 60s Britain tended to catalogue the novelists of this period according to a well-established dichotomy between tradition and innovation in which the traditional realist novels, the neorealist works of C. P. Snow, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis, were privileged over any other fictional work having modernist innovative characteristics. Therefore, the first published novels of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles, novelists belonging to today&rsquo / s postmodern canon, were first critically recognised as social realist works in Britain. One of the objects of this study is to demonstrate the shortcomings of this classification. Moreover, the main argument of the study is that none of these three novelists should have been classified as a traditional realist novelist. All of these three British postwar novelists were reconceptualising traditional realism by self-reflexively including the problem of representation as part of their conventional subject matters in their formal realist novels.

"Longer works of fiction," a character in William Gaddis's JR complains of the current literary scene, are now "dismissed as classics and remain . . . largely unread due to the effort involved in reading and turning any more than two hundred pages" (527). This study argues that despite most literary critics constructing American postmodernism as a movement that privileges short works, in contrast to the encyclopedic masterworks of modernism, there are in fact a large number of artistically sophisticated contemporary novels of encyclopedic scope that demonstrate often ignored lines of continuity from works like James Joyce's Ulysses. In arguing this, I attempt not just to draw attention to a neglected strain in contemporary American fiction, but also to provide a more accurate context in which those few recent encyclopedic novels that have assumed centrality, like Gravity's Rainbow, might be evaluated. In doing so, this thesis also seeks to demonstrate the pivotal position of William Gaddis who, despite publishing four impressive novels that engage with the legacy of modernism and pre-empt elements of postmodernism, has been excluded from most studies dealing with the transition between the two movements. Through detailed readings of four encyclopedic novels - Gaddis's The Recognitions, Don DeLillo's Underworld, Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest - I show Gaddis's continuation of encyclopedic modernism, the importance of his example to later writers, and the continuing vitality of the encyclopedic novel beyond the defined limits of modernism. However, as these novels try to encompass the full circle of knowledge, in order to do justice to their diverse learning I have adopted a different approach in each chapter. Very broadly, they attempt to encircle art, psychology, science, and literature, which, taken together, attempt to synthesise a defence of the contemporary encyclopedic novel. While minimalist writers from Raymond Carver to Ann Beattie have affirmed that less is more, this thesis argues that, in some cases, more really is more.

This thesis has two main objectives. First, it outlines a taxonomy of reflexive development practice, which aims at transcending the divide between modernism and postmodernism in the methodology of development economics. Second, the thesis examines the taxonomy in two countries at opposite ends of the development spectrum, Vanuatu and Singapore, attempting to show that the taxonomy provides insights for policymaking. The taxonomy is the principal contribution. It suggests an examination of external values and norms; an assessment of the importance of local context; a recognition that policies can worsen the problems that they try to solve; and the idea that theory and policy should be revised as circumstances change. The taxonomy is developed as a way of addressing the difficulties encountered by the modernist Washington Consensus on the one hand and postmodernism on the other. Some postmodernists have criticised modernists for trying to make universal statements based on findings specific to a particular time and context. A further criticism is that the modernist-type theorising exemplified by the Washington Consensus assumes too much certainty, putting excessive faith in the ‘expert’ outsider. Postmodernists, on the other hand, have often been criticised for being relativist or even being against theory itself. In extreme versions of postmodernism, the entire rejection of epistemological foundations allows no analysis or significant discussion. The taxonomy aims to steer away from the pitfalls of either tradition, emphasising in particular the unity of theory and practice and the need for analysis and policy advice to take account of both the objectivism of the outsider and the subjectivism of the insider. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part discusses how the open systems approach of critical realism, John Maynard Keynes and the neo-Austrians aims to overcome the difficulties of modernism and postmodernism. It then examines some of the principal uses of the term reflexivity in the past century or so, suggesting that some of these uses are compatible with each other and with the idea of open systems. This section draws on the work of several economic methodologists and sociologists, including Karl Marx, Karl Mannheim, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens and thinkers within the sociology of scientific knowledge. Next is a critical discussion of the Washington Consensus and its amended version, followed by the development of the taxonomy. Part two begins with a brief discussion of the nature of comparison within developing economies, before looking at the taxonomy in the context of Vanuatu and Singapore. Following the case-studies is an attempt to draw lessons from the experience of the two countries. Finally, the discussion is summarised and some conclusions established.

In contemporary philosophy about justice, a contrast between empirical and transcendental approaches can be identified. Hillel Steiner represents an empirical approach: he argues for building an account of justice-as-rights out of the minimal inductive material of psychological linguistic and moral intuitions. From this opening, he ultimately concludes that persons have original rights to self-ownership and to an initially equal share of natural resources. Emmanuel Levinas represents a transcendental approach: he argues that justice arises from a transcendent ethical relation of responsibility-for-the-Other. This relation underpins all subjective cognition, and makes rationality, reasoning, and rights possible. Analysis of each of these positions reveals certain problems. On the one hand, Steiner’s argument contains a number of latent methodological, conceptual, and structural presuppositions. These include the pretheoretical concepts of “person”, “equality”, and “consistency”. These presuppositions prefigure and condition the conclusions which Steiner reaches. On the other hand, Levinas fails to provide a convincing account of how the self comes to be an object of my own deliberations about morality and justice. This amounts to an annihilation of the subject which undermines his argument for the subject as a site of responsible action. As Steiner identifies, justice encompasses equal moral agents. Levinas’s hyperbolic description of the ethical relation’s asymmetry must therefore be revised. Nevertheless, what remains is the strength of Levinas’s argument for the priority of the ethical relation over thematization, rationality, and consciousness. The hidden presuppositions supporting Steiner’s work are evidence of Levinas’s plausibility in this respect. Steiner’s account of justice-as-rights requires a prior ethical relation in which we recognise one another as separate persons, each possessing an ethical status of their own; an attitude of justice motivates Steiner’s description of justice. This attitude is evident in language, which is communication before it is thought. In that individual rights can be conceived only on the basis of a relation of responsibility, rights are primordially the rights of the Other.

Die Dissertation widmet sich den intertextuellen Schreibstrategien in Ingeborg Bachmanns (1926-1973) Todesarten-Romanen Malina und Das Buch Franza und Elfriede Jelineks (1946-) Roman Die Klavierspielerin und Dramolett Der Tod und das Mädchen V (Die Wand). In diesem Zusammenhang werden zum einen die Systemreferenzen der beiden Österreicherinnen auf die Psychoanalyse und zum anderen die Bezüge auf einzelne sowohl literarische als auch philosophische und mythologische Texte untersucht. Es wird gezeigt, inwiefern sich Bachmanns Inszenierung der Hysterie in Anlehnung an die Schriften Sigmund Freuds und Josef Breuers von Jelineks Inszenierung des psychoanalytischen Diskurses unterscheidet. Bei Bachmann, die sich auf psychoanalytische Schriften beruft bzw. diese zugunsten ihrer eigenen Krankheitskonzeption verwirft, stellt die Hysterie den literarischen Gegenstand dar. Jelinek hingegen erhebt die Hysterie zum Schreibprinzip, insofern sie die inkriminierten Strukturen durch eine Art hysterische Mimesis parodierend bloßzustellen versucht. Die Funktion der Einzeltextreferenzen wird im Kontext von Bachmanns utopischer und Jelineks satirischer Schreibweise erarbeitet. Während Bachmann durch Bezüge u.a. auf Virginia Woolf und Paul Celan Bedeutungszusammenhänge schafft, bringt Jelinek ihre Texte durch die Anhäufung intertextueller Verweise u.a. auf Heidegger, Platon, Hesiod, Homer und Christa Woolf sowie auf Leben und Schaffen Bachmanns, Sylvia Plaths und Marlen Haushofers an den Rand der Bedeutungsimplosion. Die intertextuellen Strategien der beiden Schriftstellerinnen werden zum Schluss im Licht der Moderne/Postmoderne-Diskussion betrachtet. ----------------------------------- La thèse est consacrée aux stratégies décriture intertextuelles dans les romans « Malina » et « Franza » du cycle « Manières de mourir » dIngeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) et au roman « La Pianiste » et au dramolet « La Jeune Fille et la Mort V (Le Mur) » dElfriede Jelinek (1946-). Sont examinés dans ce cadre dune part les références systémiques des deux Autrichiennes à la psychanalyse et dautre part les renvois à divers textes, tant littéraires que philosophiques ou mythologiques. Il est montré dans quelle mesure la mise en scène de lhystérie par Bachmann à lappui des écrits de Sigmund Freud et Joseph Breuer diffère de la mise en scène du discours psychanalytique par Jelinek. Chez Bachmann, qui se base dans sa nosographie sur des écrits psychanalytiques tout en rejetant ces derniers au profit de sa propre conception de la maladie, lhystérie constitue lobjet littéraire. Jelinek, par contre, élève lhystérie au rang de principe décriture dans la mesure où elle tente de ridiculiser de manière parodique les structures incriminées par une sorte de mimesis hystérique. La fonction des références intertextuelles est investiguée dans le contexte des procédés décriture utopique de Bachmann et satirique de Jelinek. Alors que Bachmann met en place des rapports de sens au moyen de références entre autres à Virginia Woolf et Paul Celan, Jelinek mène ses textes au bord de limplosion sémantique par la multiplication des références intertextuelles, entre autres à Martin Heidegger, Platon, Hésiode, Homère et Christa Wolf ainsi quà la vie et à luvre de Bachmann, Sylvia Plath et Marlene Haushofer. Pour terminer, les stratégies intertextuelles des deux auteurs sont étudiées à la lumière de la discussion moderne/postmoderne. ---------------------------------------- This thesis focuses on the intertextual writing strategies in Ingeborg Bachmanns (1926-1973) novels Malina and Franza (from her cycle of novels Ways of Dying) as well as in Elfriede Jelineks (1946-) novel The Piano Teacher and her drama Death and the Maiden V (The Wall). In this context the authors allusions to psychoanalysis and their references to various literary, philosophical and mythological texts are thoroughly investigated. The analysis reveals that Bachmanns staging of hysteria, in the way it recalls Sigmund Freuds and Josef Breuers writings, differs from the way Jelinek deals with psychoanalytical discourse. Bachmann who partly relies on psychoanalytical writings and partly rejects them in favour of her own concept of malady chooses hysteria as her literary topic. Jelinek, on the contrary, makes hysteria her writing principle in trying to uncover incriminated structures by parodying them in some sort of hysterical mimesis. This thesis also investigates the functioning of the authors intertextual links in the context of Bachmanns utopian, and Jelineks satirical, writing style. While Bachmann creates new meaning through references, among others, to Virginia Woolf and Paul Celan, Jelineks texts reach the point of semantic implosion - by the amassment of intertextual hints (for instance to Martin Heidegger, Plato, Hesiod, Homer and Christa Wolf) and references to the life and work of her fellow writers Bachmann, Sylvia Plath and Marlen Haushofer. Finally, both authors intertextual strategies are examined in the light of the Modernism versus Postmodernism discussion.